Lee Cusenbary is the General Counsel at Mission Pharmacal Company in San Antonio. He is also the creator of Ethics Follies®, a musical parody that uses comedy to raise ethics issues. The fully-produced Broadway-style musical combines San Antonio's business leaders and professional actors to engage the community. It is featured each year by The Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC) for their ethics conference which benefits The Community Justice Program. Lee is also a frequent writer and speaker on why "good ethics is good for business," and is a recipient of the San Antonio Business Ethics Award. In 2012, ACC renamed their ethics awards the "Lee Cusenbary Ethical Life Award" in recognition of his commitment to ethics in law and business. Learn more about how you can be part of a more ethical culture at EthicsFollies.com.

Note: This is an mySA.com City Brights Blog. These blogs are not written or edited by mySA or the San Antonio Express-News. The authors are solely responsible for the content.

San Antonio Ethics in Business Awards: Guiding Tomorrow’s Business Leaders

For the last five years, the San Antonio Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health has worked with the UTSA College of Business to come up with nominations and winners of the San Antonio Ethics in Business Awards. I had the good fortune to attend the awards ceremony tonight and was inspired and encouraged by the commitment the Center and UTSA have made to educating young people in ethical business practices.

The UTSA students research and write about the ethics and corporate responsibility of the nominees and really get under the hood to see what makes companies like USAA, The Spurs Organization, The San Antonio Food Bank and the Humane Society and others run like the ethical organizations that they are. The nominees then mentor the students, giving UTSA students a real advantage when faced with challenges of managing others in their professional lives.

The Ecumenical Center acted on a vision to intentionally increase the dialog and conversation around the topic of business ethics in San Antonio. Their belief is that…

Good ethics leads to healthy businesses.

Healthy businesses lead the healthy people.

Healthy people lead to healthy communities.

The result is the San Antonio Ethics in Business Initiative.

For the first four years, the Center collected nominations from the public and through a committee of those companies whose names would be submitted to UTSA students for their research projects. Those reports were then analyzed by an independent selection committee and five were selected to receive special recognition at an annual dinner event. In the Spring of 2009, the Ethics in Business committee undertook a strategic planning session to look at how the program was running and plan for long-term sustainability. In addition, they wanted to address the concept that companies were seeing themselves as “winners” or “losers,” as this was never our intent.

The outcome was a complete restructuring of the program that focuses on initiatives, rather than general business, enabling businesses to be nominated year after year for different initiatives, as well as encourage them to initiate and strengthen new and existing programs. This also helps the students focus their reports and go into a level of depth with the businesses they are researching.

Proceeds from the event benefit the Ecumenical Center for Religion and Health to strengthen individuals, families and organizations and the UTSA College of Business to further the study and teachings of ethical business practices. From what I understood from listening to the speakers at the awards, the Center provides counseling and other services that appreciate people’s religious beliefs and other important services. Mental health services are apparently a much-utilized service they provide.

The Pearl Stables was full of good encouragement for UTSA and St. Mary’s University business students, and the familiar faces at ethics events that give them depth and character, like John Hornsby from Zachry Holdings, Earnie Broughton from USAA, Professor Matt Gilley from St. Mary’s University, Debi Pfitzenmaier, who organized the entire event beautifully, and Donna Tuttle of the San Antonio Business Journal.